Your Competent Child

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   A child who resists is not refusing to cooperate but signalling that the price has become too high — and the genuinely worrying child is the one who never resists.

   Your Competent Child · 1995

   Equal dignity is not equal power: the adult decides, but the child's need weighs the same.

   Juul, a Danish family therapist, changed the frame in a way many parents at first find irritating. His thesis: children cooperate from the start, through imitation and adaptation, because the relationship with the adult is their life. When a child resists, they have already cooperated for a long time and are signalling a cost. His central distinction is between equal dignity and equal power. The adult remains the one who decides and who carries responsibility — this is not a family democracy — but the child's feelings, needs and perspective carry the same weight as the adult's, not one discounted in proportion to age. Hence his way of putting limits: instead of you are not allowed, say I do not want, I do not agree, this does not suit me. The difference is not cosmetic: the first invents an impersonal rule, the second shows a person holding a position, which is exactly what the child has to learn to do in turn. And the adult's personal responsibility for their own state — you are not making me angry, I am tired — takes the child out of the role of cause of someone else's emotions.

   “Children cooperate. The problem is not that they fail to cooperate but that sometimes they cooperate too much and for too long, at their own expense.”

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